Netbook Reviews

Shuttle have been making ultra-compact PC for many years, before the words netbook and nettop even took off.

They have now announced their latest ultra compact and thin nettop to the world. The Shuttle Barebone XS35 is just 3.3cm thin, and is HD compatible.

The Shuttle XS35 is made even more interesting by the use of the new Pineview Intel Atom D510 dual core processor (1.66GHz x2), and the much talked about “Next Generation Ion” or the NVIDIA GT218 (ION2) as Shuttle are calling it.

Fujitsu might not currently be one of the major players in the netbook market today, but their latest Lifebook MH380 netbook is miles better than their previous offerings.

The Fujitsu Lifebook MH380 is their latest netbook offering, which features the new Intel Atom N450 processor and a 10-inch LCD. While this might sound all to standard at first, the Fujitsu MH380 has some extra offerings up it’s sleeve.

While the netbook market has quickly become packed with Intel latest generation Atom processor, the N450, as seen by the vast number of netbooks sporting it in our netbook comparison page. The slightly faster N470 has yet to show it’s face in the mass market.

Intel already has plans to improve the N450 and N470 even more by adding DDR3 memory support.

The Nvidia Ion graphics shook up the netbook industry last year bringing 1080HD playback and gaming to a number of netbooks. Ever since then there has been a lot of talk and speculation about the Ion’s successor, the Nvidia Ion 2.

More recently there has been much talk about switching graphics. This is where the netbook or notebook features two graphics cards, a standard low powered one, and a faster more powerful, but also more power hungry one.

Alienware are well known for making high powered computers aimed at gamers. So when we first heard that they were working on a netbook type device it gained our attention, along with that of many around the Internet.

The Alienware M11x is an 11.6-inch thin and light laptop which crosses into the netbook realm, but it is of course a very different machine than a standard netbook, offering gaming on the go.

When the Alienware M11X mini laptop gaming rig / netbook was first announced it certainly kicked up a lot of attention.

At the time of it’s announcement, it’s exact specifications and pricing were unknown. Alienware have now announced that the M11X will be available from $799 from March 2nd. While it won’t ship ’till then, you can get your order in if you wish.

With a vast number of netbooks on the market today, and with that number growing all the time it can be hard to keep track of them all.

This is why I have created the netbook comparison database. It makes it easy to find and compare different netbooks by their key specifications and price.

The database can be sorted by any column, such as hard drive space or battery life, along with being search and filterable.

Well well, the long rumored and speculated Apple tablet has now been officially announced as the Apple iPad.

Looking unsurprisingly similar to a large iPhone, the iPad has a 9.7-inch multitouch display with a 1024 x 768 resolution, measuring 9.56″ x 7.47″ x 0.5. It will be available in three different storage capacities (16GB, 32GB and 64GB). Rather than using an Intel Atom CPU or similar Apple have gone with their own 1GHz Apple A4 ARM based processor.

Just last month ViewSonic announced their VNB102 netbook, which has a great sleek new design. Less than a month later they are showing off their latest 10-inch netbook at CES, the ViewSonic VNB105.

Like all the new netbooks announced over the last few weeks the VNB105 features the latest Intel Atom N450 1.6GHz CPU which uses less power than the previous generation Atom.

Not much to go on just yet, but this should definitely be interesting / exciting. Alienware, who are better known for producing highend gaming desktops / laptops have just announced the Alienware M11X 11.6-inch netbook!

The Alienware M11X netbook features an 11.6-inch LCD, Nvidia GT335M switchable graphics and a rumored battery life of 6.5 hours. The battery life does drop down to “over 2 hours” in gaming mode though.